This one goes out to those on both the Left & Right - and anyone in between - who falls for the ridiculous notion that there is something wrong with "standardized testing."

Absent testing, we would have no idea how well or poorly educated our kids were. This is one of the reasons that BIG ED hates testing - standardized or otherwise. Testing exposes them for the failure that they are. Unfortunately, it (testing) has been co-opted enough to protect BIG ED as well.

Like most issues that are debated in education, the complexities that develop out of the complete lack of accountability and over spending of funds tend to create a great deal of ambiguity.

__

Let's start with the obvious.

Despite many parents' belief in the discredited "progressivist" ideology of BIG ED, they still wish their children to be educated. Hence their support of measurement (otherwise known as testing). Try as they might, BIG ED can't kill the support for testing, so they discredit it (through "Ed School" research and other politically suspect organizations) as best they can.

So, testing occupies a political limbo - parent's want it, but are trained to hate it. This creates the opportunity for BIG ED to do what BIG ED must to maintain its grasp on public dollars - they must kill the messenger.

This is a loooooong document. But when you are done with it, you should be cured of any nonsense regarding the "evils" of testing. Below is a brief example of some of the the best tidbits. They focus on the particular piece of silliness revolving around "lower order" & "higher order" thinking skills.

The mediocre people we send through 'ed school' are indoctrinated with the insipid notion that you can develop "higher order thinking skills" with out the foundation of knowledge & content - what these mediocrities call "mere facts" or "lower order thinking skills."

To suggest that you can develop HOTS with out LOTS (now there's a serendipitous set of acronyms for you) is to suggest that you can have "imagination" with out "knowledge." Maybe you can, but what good is it?

__

Testing Critique in RED

Testing emphasizes "lower order thinking skills."

Lorrie Shepard has also asserted:

High-stakes testing misdirects instruction even for the basic skills. Under pressure, classroom instruction is increasingly dominated by tasks that resemble tests....Even in the early grades, students practice finding mistakes rather than do real writing, and they learn to guess by eliminating wrong answers...

Response in Blue

Critics like Smith and Shepard say that intensive instruction in basic skills denies the slow students instruction in the "the neat stuff" in favor of "lower-order thinking."81 They argue that time for preparing students for high-stakes tests reduces "ordinary instruction." They cannot abide the notion that preparing students for a standardized test could be considered instruction, because it is not the kind of instruction that they favor.82

Instruction to which teachers may resort to help students improve their scores on standardized tests tends not to be constructivist. It is the type of instruction, however, that teachers feel works best for knowledge and skill acquisition. Teachers in high-stakes testing situations do not deliberately use instructional practices that impede learning: they use those that they find to be most successful.

These testing critics idealize the concept of teachers as individual craftspersons, responding to the unique needs of their unique pupils in unique ways with "creative and innovative" curriculum and instruction.83 But the most difficult jobs in the world are those that must be created anew every day without any consistent structure, and performed in isolation without collaboration or advice. In Public Agenda's research, "teachers routinely complained that teaching is an isolated and isolating experience."84

By contrast, teachers in other countries are commonly held to more narrowly prescribed curricula and teaching methods. Furthermore, because their curricula and instructional methods are standardized, they can more easily and productively work together and learn from each other. They seem not to suffer from a loss of "creativity and innovation"; indeed, when adjusted for a country's wealth, teachers in other nations are commonly paid more, and usually have greater prestige.85

Critics like Shepard and Smith cannot accept that some teachers may want to conform to systemwide standards for curriculum, instruction, and testing. Standardization brings the security, convenience, camaraderie, and common professional development that accompany a shared work experience.

___

Critique con't:

Testing Emphasize on Lower-Order Thinking

One CSTEEP (an anti-testing interest group) study, funded by the National Science Foundation, analyzed whether several widely used commercial (and mostly multiple-choice) tests required "higher-" or "lower-order" thinking. A press account boasted, "In the most comprehensive study of its kind yet conducted, researchers from Boston College have found evidence to confirm the widespread view that standardized and textbook tests emphasize low-level thinking and knowledge and that they exert a profound, mostly negative effect on classroom interaction."

Response:

Many readers would be astonished, as I still am, by the vehemence of some critics' ire toward something as seemingly dull and innocuous as item response format. Yet many of the accusations leveled at multiple-choice items have little substance. For example, you can often find in CSTEEP and FairTest publications assertions that multiple-choice items demand only factual recall and "lower-order" thinking, while "performance-based" test do neither. Both claims are without merit. It is the structure of the question, not the response format, that determines the character of the cognitive processing necessary to reach a correct answer.

Test items can be banal and simplistic or intricately complex and, either way, their response format can be multiple-choice or open-ended. There is no necessary correlation between the difficulty of a problem and its response format. Even huge, integrative tasks that require fifty minutes to classify, assemble, organize, calculate, and analyze can, in the end, present the test-taker with a multiple-choice response format. Just because the answer to the question is among those provided, it is not necessarily easy or obvious how to get from the question to the answer.

Anyone who still thinks that multiple-choice items demand only factual recall should take a trip to the bookstore and look at some SAT or ACT help books.

___

Bruno again:

This goes on for pages, but you get the idea. This study thoroughly debunks the "anti-testing" dogma. There are plenty of other places to find this information, but the best link is the one above.

Just remember, BIG ED hates testing because testing informs you of how effective BIG ED is at providing us with an "educated populace." The idea that "testing is bad" is a myth.

There is virtually no "local control" in Public Education. If there were, our schools would be be much better, and certainly less expensive.

Now, there certainly is the "myth" of local control, which keeps the natives fat & happy in their belief that they actually have a say in how their local schools are run. This myth is propagated by the few instances where local citizens may have the opportunity to chime in on tiny matters of policy.

The area where local citizens have some control (at least in IL) is local tax referenda. Note that this doesn't impact curricula, hiring, contract talks, or the like. It only "limits" the increase in education taxes. As many have pointed out before, districts have many tricks (some legal & some illegal) to circumvent taxpayer wishes in this department - but that is a whole other post.

In virtually everything else, "local control" is only a thin veneer, beneath which the education bureaucracy does pretty much anything it wants.

For example, let's look at the School Board. What power does it have? Virtually none, if the goal is actually to affect change.

First, most School Boards are bought & paid for by teacher union money. When a person drops off the board, the appointment is almost always some one inside the education establishment.

The board can pick Superintendent, who supposedly "manages" the district. Superintendents are pretty much a protected class of people who have "graduated" from teaching to taxing. But all of you should know that superintendents are part of the same cabal. They have fancy doctorates, but their only solution to any district problem is to whine about a shortage of money, and set you up for a tax increase.

[As an aside: Superintendents often hire consultants to help them "sell" tax increases to the clueless voters. And who are these consultants? You guessed it! Former Superintendents! It's all one big happy pig fest, with the pigs slopping around in a dirty, steaming, smelly pile of taxpayer dollars.]

Superintendents are often hired for the sole purpose of shepherding through such a tax increase, and if they fail, they are often fired (but with great retirement packages). If fired, the School Board might spend a pretty penny on specialized "head hunter" organizations that pawn off the same pile of petty bureaucrats for a 30% (of an inflated salary) finders fee.

Superintendents do not report to the Board as much as tell the Board what they are going to do, and they are nearly always in lockstep with the teacher's unions and the state level educational establishment.

Let us take for example the increasing number of news stories about corrupt districts, corrupt boards & corrupt superintendents. This often leads to one or two 'concerned citizens' to run for the school board. They sometimes actually beat the "establishment" candidate.

If this new board member(s) make any attempt to affect a change that might lead to real reform, the Superintendent, old School Board members, and the teacher's unions will isolate the newcomer, and spout the phrase the defines the entire corrupt system.

"We can't do anything about that - it's mandated."

States mandate collective bargaining with collectivist unions.

States mandate construction codes so that new school (charters or independents) can't be built with out massive cost over runs for their connected contractors.

And who lobbied for those mandates? You Guessed Right again! School Boards (through their Associations), Teacher's Unions, and Superintendents (through their Associations).

Let me end where I began. Elections for school boards, superintendent hiring decisions, and the occasional strike are all charades designed to fool you into thinking there is such a thing as "local control" There is no such thing, as any attempt to actually test the hypothesis will prove.

There are only two ways to achieve REAL local control, and both are viewed as "radical" by the herd of soccer mom (and their emasculated husbands)

One way is to do what you would/could if you were in the Amityville Horror - !!GET OUT!! of the public system!!

The second is to wait for school choice (or help bring it about MAYBE!!), which is the ultimate in local control.

Vast numbers of suburbanites have fallen for the myth that the exorbitant spending on public education in their specific District increases the value of their homes.

Interestingly, it is entirely fair to say that this myth -- all by itself -- does have a positive impact on home values.Like most myths, there is a grain of truth behind it.The grain of truth here -- and it is a tiny grain -- is that the perceptions of the herd (herd of suburbanites in this case) actually does have a slight positive impact the value of their properties.

However, your typical suburbanite ignores the fact that high property taxes have a far greater negative impact on the value of their home.

Let me give you a brief example.[WARNING! - the following demonstration involves the use of mathematics.Anybody who has graduated from an American public school in the last 20-30 years may have difficulty following this process.]

I just opened Excel a few seconds ago and entered a very simple "net present value" calculation.I used an interest rate of 5% (a low estimation of a mortgage rate).I then assumed a 10-year period of home ownership with a slightly lower than typical upper-middle-class suburban education tax bill of around $4000 per year.[Most people in the middle-class suburbs of Chicago pay more than $4000 to Big Ed.]

The net present value of a 10-year series of payments at 5% is just over $30,000.That is the amount that the education portion of your property tax bill takes right off of the top of the value of your property.

Obviously, this number will vary greatly depending on how long you plan to remain in your home and what interest rate you use to calculate that present value.This was just intended as a simple demonstration.

Now, it may be arguable that this myth [that an expensive, inefficient bureaucracy increases your property value] actually does have a greater positive impact on your property than the exorbitant education taxes have a negative impact.

However, should the herd of suburbanites ever come to understand the true level of mediocrity in their public education system, they will revolt against that system.It is my bet that the collapse of this myth will not have a dramatic negative impact on property values.

Here is why.Real estate values are a function of location, not education spending.People buy in desirable areas because social factors, and they believe that education spending is one of those factors.The truth is that the education "outcomes" (which are nowhere near as good as people think they are) are far more a function of the socioeconomic status of the area than they are of exorbitant spending.

The link between education spending and property values is a self-propagating myth.Myths of this nature can endure for a longtime.The economic havoc that Big Education is wreaking upon state and local finances cannot.

There is a great liberal word that describes public education today. "Unsustainable."

Education is a commodity. Educators are not members of a "priesthood." When we talk about "public education," we need to think about getting an "educated populace," and not how much of our tax dollars get "tithed" to a protected monopoly called the "Education Bureaucracy" (BIG ED, for short).

If I were to be allowed to "codify" the definition of an 'educated populace', it would be along the lines of "the most neural connections/child for the least amount of money." Today's "policy maker" - and the dingbats who elected them - seem to view the same goal as the vacuous "how much money are we spending?"

If we are to buy into our founding father's arguments - that there is an important value to having "an educated populace." - then the only question one should ask in terms of achieving such a populace is "how little can we spend for the maximum amount of 'education'?"

I realize there is sounds cruel. All of us are raised with the myth of the archetypal "motivating teacher" who helped speed us along the path of enlightenment. While we may find many instances of this archetype in today's education system, the fact is that this type of person is the exception, not the rule. The majority of people in education today are "union label" drones who mark their impact in "time served" and worthless 'edu-ma-cation' degrees that train them in how to increase taxes - not knowledge.

Education is about neural connections. Education is also about the ability to recall the facts and figures from the broadest body of knowledge possible.

The brutal reality is that a person who can recite the multiplication tables by heart is educated. The person who requires a calculator to access the same information is not.

The person who can place the Civil War, World Wars I & II (which came first?) and the Spanish-American war in the proper sequence and context understands much more about their nation and civilization than the person who cannot place these wars in sequence. The latter stands very little chance of being able to assist in maintaining our civilization.

These are harsh words, but they demand acceptance. Take this following question as a litmus test. If it could be shown that a $35,000 year teacher with a class size of 30 students could teach third graders to read more efficiently than a $100,000/year teacher with a class size of fifteen students, wouldn't you demand that your school system utilize the less expensive/more efficient option?

If your answer is "No," then you should consider yourself one of the brainwashed masses who equates quality with spending -- and studiously ignores rationality.

This is not to argue that there are not some excellent teachers who kindle the fires of curiosity and imagination in our children. I have no idea how many teachers rise to such quality. However, I know that it is not 100 percent of the teachers, and probably below 50 percent. Yet, the typical suburban soccer mom views our educational system as some sort of priesthood. They treat the system as if it were an unassailable church instead of a "service provider."

Interestingly, this dogmatic religious fervor extends to the entire education bureaucracy. Any attempt to reform the spending processes, whether they are applied to maintenance workers, guidance counselors, or bus companies, is met with the zombie-like mantra that you are taking money from "the children."

It is time for this absurd state of affairs to end. Educators do not belong to a "priesthood"; they belong to a Union. They are not "experts" who know more than you do about educating a population; they are experts at extracting funds from taxpayers through political clout.

I have used this example many times in the past and I'll use it again. If every public school in the nation collapsed to rubble tomorrow morning, the educational output of this nation would probably not drop one percentage point. In fact, it would probably improve.

Americans have unfortunately sold themselves on the absurd idea that we need massive buildings, with massive infrastructure, fueled by a massive bureaucracy and massive payroll, to educate our children. This simply isn't the case. What American education really needs is a core group of dedicated professionals offering a cornucopia of varying methods and content in the open market place of ideas.

It's called education choice, and there is no intellectually sound argument against it.

Of all of the myths promoted by the Cartel in control of our public education system; and believed by the herd of soccer mom (and their emasculated husbands); is the mistaken belief that more spending equals better results.

Now, this is a topic that has been studied to death. Some studies "prove" that of course spending more money will get you better results, while others show that it doesn't.

Like most of these Public Education Myths, a little application of common sense goes a long way. This is why the Cartel has declared a war on common sense. Kill common sense, and you can convince the electorate of anything.

Ask yourself these questions.

When a teacher 2-3 years from retirement gets large salary increases (for the purposes of gaming a higher pension), how does that help "improve education?"

When that teacher retires and the replacement is used to hire three low salary special education "facilitators" to place disruptive or severely handicapped children in a regular classroom, how does that help "improve education?"

When the state increases taxes to paper over a $17 billion shortfall in the Teacher's Retirement System, how does that help "improve education?"

When a connected building contractor is allowed to submit different bids for the same school renovation project; with differences depending on whether a new school building is approved by referendum or not, how does that help "improve education?"

Answer... None of the above will "improve" education. They are actual examples of legal and illegal corruption. To approve taxes at the state or local level to fund this corruption is to lie to yourself. This is psychologically unhealthy.

___

The examples above are only the tip of the iceberg, and they are evidence that I'm right about exposing this myth. The fact is that the US spends more than any OECD nation on education and gets much less.

Sooner or later the suburban voters (brainwashed by their union bought PTOs and PTAs) have to realize that the money they are spending isn't getting them what they are paying for.

Now, the excuse most often given when confronted by this incontrovertible evidence of failure is that "schools have to do so much more than they used to."

The only proper response to this nonsense is that this is a lie. Certainly, there are social workers, counselors, and an army of people to administrate the army of over-staffing that are driving "education" costs ever higher.

The sad fact however, is that they aren't DOING ANYTHING to increase the number of neural connections that need to take place in our childrens' heads.

Our children aren't better adjusted, better counseled, or more efficiently taught. They are, in fact, an increasingly functionally illiterate, innumerate, and uncompetitive cadre of complainers.

The fact is you could cut spending on education in the US by a 3rd (from $500 billion to $330 billion or so) and not notice an single reduction in results. It is one of purposes to prove this true in my life time.

Start with mass firings of Psychologists, Special Education hangers on, Social Workers and Assistant Knob Polishers.

Get rid of automatic raises for Education Tissue Paper Degrees and "time served".

Implement Merit Pay

Provide Education Choice for all disadvantaged students, difficult students, and special needs students by tying all monies to the student, not the ficticious concept of the "district."